Lord, Richard

ORAL HISTORY OF RICHARD S. LORD
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
March 17, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is March 17th, 2011 and I’m at the home of Dick and Kay Lord here in Oak Ridge and I’m talking with Dick Lord. Dick, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Mr. Lord: We’re glad to have this opportunity to talk to you.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Well, tell me a little bit – I just spoke to your wife and we found a little bit about her and her background. Why don’t you tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family?
Mr. Lord: Well, I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but as an infant I moved from there, so I have no recollections other than going back for visits, which I did because I had relatives there. I grew up in Pitman, New Jersey. It was a town of five thousand people with most people working somewhere else. The only industry in Pitman was the laundry and people worked at refineries over on the Delaware River where they worked in Philadelphia for various entities, a lot of them with the railroad. My father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia. He never was in the operating of trains. He was in the office business. We first met in Sunday school. We were both pretty young at that time. And I was playing the organ for Sunday school and I guess I moved on to playing the organ for church shortly after we met.
Mr. McDaniel: So what did your mom do when you were growing up?
Mr. Lord: My mom was a stay-at-home mom and she had a routine. She washed on Mondays. She’d iron on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I’ve forgotten what she did. But there was a task for every day and she kept busy at home.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you have brothers or sisters?
Mr. Lord: No, I’m an only child.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re an only child. But you kept her busy, though, didn’t you.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah. I can remember her chasing me with a switch. I don’t remember what it is I did, but it was something I wasn’t supposed to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, you said you played organ fairly early. So you must have gotten that love of music from somebody.
Mr. Lord: My mother loved music. She and her sister, my aunt, would go to the Metropolitan Opera when they were in Philadelphia. And once in a while, when I was high school age, she would give her ticket to me and my aunt would give her ticket to my cousin and we would go over and hear the opera if it were particularly useful, interesting. Or the other case would be when it was particularly uninteresting to my mother and my aunt. So we had several occasions when we went to the opera. I enjoyed listening to symphonic music. I enjoyed listening to the big band music. I still do. And I had to take piano lessons. I didn’t really like taking piano lessons, and I didn’t get to be very good at it, but it was enough to entertain me, so I have a piano.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to say. You’re sitting in front of a baby grand there, so you must play decently, then.
Mr. Lord: I played enough to amuse myself and I did play piano for one of the churches for a while. So I didn’t consider myself an accomplished piano player, but I was adequate.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you said you met your wife at Sunday school.
Mr. Lord: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – and I guess you were, what, a teenager by then?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I think so.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about that.
Mr. Lord: We didn’t date at first and only after I started going to college did we have a closer association. We’d ride the train together sometimes, you know, just happened to be on the same train. I don’t know which one of us arranged that happenstance.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand. So where did you go to college?
Mr. Lord: I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Mr. McDaniel: And what did you study there?
Mr. Lord: Fortunately I studied engineering. I’m an electrical engineer. And because of that, I was able to stay in college and finish my degree when everybody else was being drafted. The feeling was that I might be learning something useful for the army which turned out to be right.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me what happened. So you graduated. Did the army already have their eye on you?
Mr. Lord: Yeah, they did. The draft board did. They called me in while I was a sophomore, I think. And asked what I was doing and was it useful foreseeably for the military. And I described the courses I was taking and how they might be useful for the military and they deferred me. I think they called me in a second time, but I can’t remember for sure that they did, when I was almost finished. Because of the war, I finished my degree in three years. We went to classes in two summers; the summer after our sophomore year and the summer after our junior year. So we ended up getting our degree in just about three years from the time I started. I started in September and graduated in October of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: So in October, when you graduated, what happened?
Mr. Lord: Well, long before I graduated, I’d had an interview with various companies looking for employees. One of them was Eastman Kodak. And I had an interest in photography and I thought, “Well, maybe that’s an opportunity.” So I expressed interest to the interviewer that I was interested in his company at least and it wasn’t long after I talked to him before I got an offer of a job in the spring of 1945, before I’d even finished my senior year. There was no specifics about the job, and in the summer I got a letter from them offering a specific job in Tennessee. No word of what it might be about. Some of my classmates had knowledge of what it might be in Tennessee and one of them suggested that it might be the Holston Ordinance Works in Kingsport. And he was pretty sure that was what it was. But it turned out not to be that. They told me to report to the Empire Building in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’m sorry, they didn’t tell me that. They told me to report to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which didn’t appear on any map. When you asked the post office about it, they didn’t know about it. My father, who worked the railroad, used that kind of information to find out about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it just didn’t appear anywhere. So I had to write a letter back to the fellows that offered me the job and say, “We can’t find Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” And I got a telegram back and it said, “Report to the Empire Building in Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Mr. McDaniel: The Empire Building? I’ve not heard of that one before.
Mr. Lord: Well, it was an office building on one of the side streets.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I can’t remember what street it was. That’s where the Tennessee Eastman had their employment office in Knoxville. That’s what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, when was this? This was ’45?
Mr. Lord: This was ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: And you hadn’t graduated college yet, had you?
Mr. Lord: Not when I got the offer and the instruction where to report.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, right.
Mr. Lord: I graduated October 30th and –
Mrs. Lord: It was ’42.
Mr. Lord: I’m sorry. I graduated in 1943. ’43.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. ’43. That’s fine.
Mr. Lord: My memory is not what it should be. I graduated in ’43 and that’s when I got the offer to come to Oak Ridge and that’s when I came was in October.
Mr. McDaniel: You came in ’43.
Mr. Lord: I came in October – no, I came in November ’43. November the 10th.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. 1943. So you graduated in October of ’43 and then came to Oak Ridge in November of ’43.
Mr. Lord: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. That’s fine.
Mr. Lord: Finally, we got it right.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s quite all right. So you came here and you were still single at the time.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about your first impressions. When you came to Knoxville, you went to the Empire Building. How did you get to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lord: Well the first thing they did when I got to the Empire Building was try to find me a place to live, because there were no places in Oak Ridge. So they sent me out to a place on 5th Avenue in Knoxville to the home of a person who had offered to rent rooms to people that Tennessee Eastman might hire. And the name of the family escapes me right now. It might come back to me. But the room was very pleasant. The family was very pleasant. They even had a piano in their living room. And so I took them up on it at $6 per week. As soon as I’d seen the room, the person who took me out there took me back to the employment office and they sent me out to Oak Ridge on the same day I arrived in Knoxville. And you asked my impression of Oak Ridge. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. They had machines moving earth in great quantities. Machines I had never seen before. I’d seen bulldozers. I’d seen steam shovels, but this one I’m talking about just scooped up the earth and moved it from here to there. And they were all over and there were construction machines running up and down the Turnpike constantly. It was mud or dust everywhere. When I arrived, the mud hadn’t arrived yet, but it wasn’t long before it was mud. And my first trip to Knoxville was to find some galoshes. They didn’t exist in Oak Ridge. They were sold out. But I did find a pair in Knoxville. Almost the last pair in the store, I think. And so I was more prepared than a lot of people for the mud when it came. But I remember that it could suck the shoes right off your feet.
Mr. McDaniel: Now what did they tell you? What were you supposed to do? What was your job?
Mr. Lord: What did they tell me? Well, what they told me was they’d lost my clearance. And I wouldn’t be going to the real work going on. I would be in the Training Division in the center of Oak Ridge, actually behind what was the Administration Building for the Army. There were some buildings back there where the Training Division existed and my job consisted of teaching people they’d hired, that is mostly women. I didn’t teach anybody but women. They hired them to be what were going to be called Cubicle Operators. Of course, I knew nothing about cubicles. They hadn’t even told me about that yet. That was restricted.
Mr. McDaniel: Was this out at Y-12? The Cubicle Operators? Where were they?
Mr. Lord: They were to be at Y-12. But they were not needed in Y-12 then, because the place wasn’t in operation.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess these were what they referred to today as calutron girls.
Mr. Lord: Yes. And they had two classifications. They were hiring people to do the calutron directly operating and then they were planning to hire people they called heater operators, which would be in the level below the calutrons and where they had to make adjustments on the heaters that heated the source in the calutron. That was something else I didn’t know about, of course, at that time. So all I could do was teach them a little bit of elementary physics and we did that the best we could. I worked in partnership with Leon Love. He would take the class for a while and then I’d take the class for a while. And that went on for a number of weeks. I think they finally reactivated my clearance – or sent out new papers for a clearance, for an investigation. And the people I had on the reference list had to fill out another recommendation, that sort of thing. Aggravating. It was aggravating to me because I wasn’t really thrilled with what I was doing.
Mr. McDaniel: And at this point you didn’t know and you had no idea what was going on.
Mr. Lord: I had no idea what was going on. I finally got a clearance, and at the same time, the Training Division moved to Y-12. And they wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay in the Training Division. But I got to see what was at Y-12. I got a tour of the different buildings with somebody as my guide and when I got to 9731, I saw my first Calutron. At that point, I knew they were separating something. Because of my background in physics, I recognized it as a very large Dempster mass spectrograph, which would have been – in the physics lab, it would have been this big, and in Y-12 it was, well, this big.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. It was huge.
Mr. Lord: And of course, nobody would tell me they were separating something.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But you knew.
Mr. Lord: That was my first inclination, first suspicion of what was going on. And then I began to realize it was on a very large scale. Because each one of the calutrons was part of what was called a track which had ninety-six calutrons in it and then there were multiple tracks at that time and they were still building them. So I had to continue teaching operators, but now I could teach them about cubicles and how to operate them even though I knew nothing about it.
Mr. McDaniel: But at least they gave you a point of reference to kind of know what you were doing, know why you were teaching.
Mr. Lord: I got some information about what to do with cubicles and then I could pass this on to the students. And they began to graduate out into the real world and become operators.
Mr. McDaniel: So how long did they keep you in the Training Division?
Mr. Lord: Until early 1945, when I was inducted into the Army. When I got my draft notice – incidentally my draft notice came while I was visiting in Pitman, New Jersey, over Christmastime, in ’44, ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: ’44.
Mr. Lord: ’44. I had been living in the “D” house with a number of other fellows, five others, and I got a telegraph from them saying that my induction notice had come and my induction notice came from my draft board in Glassboro, New Jersey. And I was supposed to be inducted from there. Well, everything I owned, which wasn’t much, was in Oak Ridge. And also, first thing I did was tell my building superintendent that I got my draft notice. And he says, “Well, don’t worry. You’ll be coming back.” And of course that worked out.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So tell me, how did that happen? So you got drafted.
Mr. Lord: I got drafted. I was drafted from Clinton, took the bus to Chattanooga, stopped in Kingston for breakfast at Peggy Ann’s Restaurant, which you may know.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Lord: And we went to – what the heck was the name of the Fort in Chattanooga? It escapes me. We were inducted officially at the army installation in Chattanooga. That is, we raised our hands and swore to defend the Constitution. And that was just basically an overnight stop. Then they sent us on to Atlanta to Fort McPherson, and we spent a couple of weeks in Fort McPherson. We were issued uniforms and given tests, told how to behave and taught how to make a bed, all those things that the first GI’s learned right away. And it was a classification center. So they decided on the basis of what they learned about you in Fort McPherson what you were going to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Where you were going to go. Sure.
Mr. Lord: What you were suited for. But two fellows who went with me from Oak Ridge to Fort McPherson and I had special orders. So before the full period at Fort McPherson was up, they issued us Pullman tickets to Shreveport, Louisiana. And they gave us a double bed with an upper bunk, so two of us bunked together on the lower berth and one of us on the upper. We had a stopover in New Orleans to change trains and then we arrived in Shreveport somewhere around midnight the next day.
Mr. McDaniel: So what were you going to Shreveport for?
Mr. Lord: Basic training.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, basic training, okay.
Mr. Lord: That was –
Mr. McDaniel: You didn’t get out of basic training, you –
Mr. Lord: We had our taste of basic training. We arrived when the program had already started for the group that we were in. So we got in at least three weeks after the start. But we did go through things like gas mask use and firing range. We got to do that. We got a lot of KP. We were inducted into that. And we just went along with the flow of that particular bunch of guys who were going through basic training. And then after a few weeks, our orders arrived and they sent us back to Oak Ridge. Mr. McDaniel: So you were gone from Oak Ridge, what, six, seven weeks?
Mr. Lord: Three weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Three weeks? Right.
Mr. Lord: Well, three weeks of basic training. There were a few weeks in Atlanta. So I don’t remember the total. You’re right, six or seven weeks altogether.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you ended up back in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lord: We ended up back in Oak Ridge after our trip back from Louisiana. We had tickets for Pullman space, but there was no space available and we sat on our luggage from Shreveport to Birmingham.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh my goodness.
Mr. Lord: In Birmingham, we got a seat. An hour before we got to Knoxville, the Pullman conductor came back and said, “I got seats for you up in the parlor car.” So we were upgraded from coach to parlor car for about an hour. And we were met by somebody from the detachment, the SED [Special Engineering Detachment] detachment in Oak Ridge at the train and went out by car. Got a lecture from the sergeant in the detachment telling us about the security that the place had and the project had. Of course, we knew all about that. And we were forbidden to leave the SED fenced area until we had gone through the security indoctrination. And after he finished, why, we went out the front gate and went to visit our friends. Fortunately, nobody caught us at it. I don’t know what they would have done.
Mr. McDaniel: So you ended up – now did you end up back on the same job or was it something completely different?
Mr. Lord: No, it was the same. Well, it was different. It was different. They had arranged for me to be on the division staff to help bring the helium leak detectors into use throughout the project. Finding vacuum leaks was a big job and the helium leak detector was supposed to make it a lot easier. And I was supposed to help integrate it into the system and train people in the use of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was that at Y-12?
Mr. Lord: Y-12, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was in the whole calutron system.
Mr. Lord: Yep. I went to every building that was operational and made sure that everybody knew what they were doing. It was a lot more pleasant than what I was doing before. At least I got to do something technical, something that an engineer might do.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess at this point, this was what, the winter of ’45, right in there?
Mr. Lord: Well, the spring of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: Spring of ’45. So I guess things were rolling –
Mr. Lord: ’44. ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it ’44?
Mr. Lord: Yeah, spring of ’44. I was inducted in –
Mr. McDaniel: How long were you in Oak Ridge before you went into the service? Were you here a year or just a few months?
Mr. Lord: You got me. I got to think about that.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, because a while ago, you said you got your draft notice over Christmas of ’44.
Mr. Lord: That had to be right.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came back in the spring of ’45. And –
Mr. Lord: Spring of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: And you got married that summer.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, I don’t know how we did that, because I was in the Army when we decided to get married and that was while I was visiting in New Jersey. Oh. We decided to get married when I first went – before I first went into the Army. When I got my draft notice is when we decided to get married. But I worked a whole year.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You were in Oak Ridge a whole year before you got your draft notice.
Mr. Lord: And six months after I was in the Army, basically six months after, we decided to get married. We got the timeline down.
Mr. McDaniel: So I guess my point was back when you – by the time you got back, things were really rolling in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lord: Pretty much.
Mr. McDaniel: It was going strong.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, it was going strong, at least in a few buildings. And it kept expanding as time went on.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, exactly. I guess all the Alpha buildings were operational.
Mr. Lord: Yeah. In the job I had I also was in the Beta buildings doing the same kind of work. So I expanded my territory.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you say you came back and you worked there. Tell me what happened I guess after the – you got married that summer. You brought Kay down and she came down.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, and we rented our one room in a house, and I went out and bought a bed at Millers Department Store in Oak Ridge, and they delivered it. We didn’t even have a chest of drawers in the room. Shortly after we moved in, we made a trip to Knoxville and bought a chest of drawers. I had to pay cash. We couldn’t charge it, because we didn’t have any credit. But we could put our clothes in something that had drawers.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. And then the bombs were dropped and the war was over that year. You were still in the service though. So how long were you in the army and what did you do?
Mr. Lord: I was in eighteen months.
Mr. McDaniel: And were you in Oak Ridge the whole time?
Mr. Lord: I was in Oak Ridge the whole time. Well, except for the time getting in and out of the army.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But when you left the army, what happened to your job?
Mr. Lord: When I left the army, I was reemployed by Tennessee Eastman. There was a rule passed by Congress that when the war was over, workers were entitled to come back to jobs that they’d had before the war if it still existed. And I’d met that qualification, as did several other people. But the employment at Tennessee Eastman took a serious drop in, I guess, 1946 when K-25 came online and proved to be much more efficient than the calutron process. But I was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay employed, and we were put in a division that was to try to improve the operation of the calutrons to where it can compete. We didn’t make it. We tried mightily, but we didn’t make it.
Mr. McDaniel: And they shut the calutrons down, basically, when K-25 took over.
Mr. Lord: Except for a few that were kept operating on special separations.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Was that part of the nuclear medicine work?
Mr. Lord: Well, somewhat. I mean there were several programs going on. The program that really kept them open was the one that was promoted by Chris Keim to separate all the stable isotopes that might be possibly useful for anything. And so Beta 3 stayed open and was largely employed in that process for a long time.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you – was that what you were involved in?
Mr. Lord: I was – no. I was in this division that was supposed to improve operation. But our division director came from the lab at Berkeley and he saw these magnets not being used as possible cyclotrons. And the Cold War was coming into prominence at that time, and the need for polonium 202 was coming up. And he figured that if we built the right kind of cyclotron, we could separate polonium 202 in massive quantities. It turned out to be a good idea. And our division with the help of the Engineering Division cobbled up a cyclotron out of magnet parts from the calutrons and then other things that were needed to make a cyclotron. And I became very involved in the operation, and making the cyclotron operate was the first job, and that was not trivial. There were a number of weeks where we sweated twenty-four hours a day trying to make that cyclotron go. But every time we’d turn on the high voltage for the radio frequency system, it would just not work. We had various theories about it, and one day, I think it was me that was looking through the glass window when they turned on the high voltage and I observed the glow inside. And we talked about it for a few minutes and decided that was detuning the oscillator. And we had to – it was electrons oscillating back and forth that loaded the oscillator down to where it wouldn’t work. The fixes that were talked about were the one that was used in Berkeley, which was use a low power oscillator to get it started, but bring it up slowly, and the other one was to insulate the radio frequency structure that was inside the cyclotron from ground and put a DC voltage on it to sweep electrons out. And that’s the one we elected to do. And we fixed it up and put some rubber hoses in to carry the water to cool the D. We told our division director what we were doing, and he says, “You’re not putting rubber hoses in my cyclotron.” And we went off dragging our tails behind us. He went on vacation that coming week, and we took out the rubber hoses and we put plastic hoses in, and we turned on the switch and it worked like magic. We had an operating cyclotron when he got back from vacation, and there was nothing wrong with plastic hoses, which we eventually changed for rubber hoses.
Mr. McDaniel: So he was pleased.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, he was pleased with that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Tell me a little bit about the evolution of your work and your job there. After that project, what did you –
Mr. Lord: Well, after the eighty-six inch cyclotron in Y-12, the thing that was coming into the cyclotron world at that time was a new design that was going to allow single frequency cyclotrons to accelerate particles to a much higher energy than was possible with the current designs. And it was called a Thomas cyclotron or an alternating variable field cyclotron. And we managed to get approval for it from both our current local people and money from Washington. And we went on to build the Oak Ridge – the ORIC [Oak Ridge Isochronous Cyclotron] cyclotron, O-R-I-C. And that was built in X-10, so my office moved to X-10. We started in Y-12 on that project but moved to X-10 in the middle of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now at this point, who was running things? Union Carbide?
Mr. Lord: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And they were running all the locations, weren’t they? Managing all the locations?
Mr. Lord: That’s true. Tennessee Eastman had gone out of the business shortly after – well, almost immediately after shutdown of production phase of Y-12. So we were employed by Union Carbide.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, about what year was it that you moved your office from Y-12 to the Lab.
Mr. Lord: 1960. We started the design in Y-12 and we finished over in X-10 about in 1960. And I think we had the first beam in ’63, but I can’t swear by that. Anyhow, that came on line in the early ’60s. The other cyclotron I was talking about came on line in 1953. And as of today, I think the ORIC cyclotron is still running. But they just got the death notice when they said they’re going to shut down the Holifield Lab. So it has run since early ’60s until 2011.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Almost 50 years.
Mr. Lord: And I think that’s amazing for some of the components to last that long. I was very much involved with the design of the magnet and the magnet coils, which nobody expected to last this long. Surely the insulation would fail by this time. It was made of paper and Mylar. We put in strips of paper with Mylar between them. And somehow or other it survived. Mylar must be pretty good for radiation resistance and so is paper. That’s what we were worried about was something failing because of radiation damage.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’63, they went on line and so what did you do after that?
Mr. Lord: Well, I had other projects related to the cyclotron. I was in charge of building a polarized ion source for the cyclotron, getting the beam from the polarized ion source into the cyclotron. Then I was involved in injecting the beam from the tandem into the cyclotron so that we could accelerate it further with the cyclotron. The big tandem came along and was a standalone accelerator and then the idea of putting it into the cyclotron and increasing the energy came along. That was my project. And I have to say they worked successfully in both cases.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you do that kind of work until you retired, that type of work?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. Magnet design was my specialty. And when I retired, I was busy designing a bending magnet to replace something that was in there, and I came back as a consultant. I worked three days a week until the money ran out.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you retire?
Mr. Lord: I retired in 1984, the day that Union Carbide left.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I didn’t want to work for [laughter].
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I understand. I guess that was a good opportunity though, wasn’t it? It was a good time.
Mr. Lord: It was a good time to go. I was sixty-one years old and things were changing. You couldn’t install a light fixture without having three people, and it was just getting to be paperwork running out your ears, and it got worse when Carbide left. Carbide was great. We thought badly of Carbide when we first had to leave Kodak, Tennessee Eastman. But Carbide turned out to be a very good company to work for.
Mr. McDaniel: They just kind of left you alone and let you do your thing, didn’t they?
Mr. Lord: Exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. So you retired in ’84 when Carbide left. Then you went back as a consultant for three days a week for how many years?
Mr. Lord: Not very long. I’m not sure that it went as long as a year.
Mr. McDaniel: Now that you look back on your career here in Oak Ridge – basically you worked here your whole career.
Mr. Lord: Absolutely. I worked in Oak Ridge. I lived in Oak Ridge. I was proud of what we did.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Tell me about that. Tell me about your satisfaction factor in all of it, personally.
Mr. Lord: I had a lot of personal satisfaction. I didn’t have any beefs that were significant with anything in the organization that I worked for. They were good to me. I got to travel to foreign countries and discuss our work at technical meetings. We were doing something that was cutting edge, nobody had done before. It was very satisfactory to be on that kind of project.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were successful and you were able to have a sense of accomplishment because you were successful.
Mr. Lord: Sense of accomplishment.
Mr. McDaniel: And it changed things. I mean the work that you did really changed things.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, it did. Not like the Manhattan Project changed things. And I was proud of the Manhattan Project, very much so.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Tell me about the day that you learned that the war was over and that Oak Ridge had been doing what it was doing and its role in the Manhattan Project.
Mr. Lord: I knew what Oak Ridge was doing long before that. And I knew that the end of the war was coming. Because I had, not definite statements that the bomb was coming, but all kinds of indications that –
[telephone rings]
Mr. McDaniel: It’s okay. Go Ahead.
Mr. Lord: All kinds of indications that the bomb was coming. And when we were on our honeymoon, Truman issued his ultimatum: “Surrender or else.” And I knew that when that came, it was coming, and it came just a couple of weeks after we came back from our honeymoon.
Mr. McDaniel: And I’ll ask this a lot. Today, I’m sure, as your wife mentioned, there are folks who don’t understand. They don’t understand what it was like during World War II.
Mr. Lord: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: They just see that the bomb was dropped and the people were killed and that’s all they see.
Mr. Lord: “That’s terrible. Why would you ever do that?” I had a big argument with some Englishmen in England about that. They were on the side that it should never have been dropped, and I was on the side that had seen – not literally seen but been aware of all the terrible things that were involved in the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely. Invariably, when I’ve interviewed folks here in the early days of Oak Ridge, and I’ve asked them their thoughts now, invariably, they say, “You know, it was a terrible, terrible, horrible war and something had to be done to stop it. And it was a horrible thing, the bomb being dropped, but something big had to happen. Something like that had to happen to make it stop.”
Mr. Lord: I think you’re right.
Mr. McDaniel: Fifty-four million people died worldwide during World War II. And people who didn’t live it, they don’t understand that, do they?
Mr. Lord: They do not. When I was in basic training, we had to see training films of actual battles going on, people dying, naval battles where ships were sinking full of people, people being blown apart. And unless you understand, it’s hard to know what happened in the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So I talked a little bit to your wife about this. What was life like for you in Oak Ridge? I’m sure you worked a lot. But you had your social life as well, too.
Mr. Lord: Well, as a single person in Oak Ridge, it was challenging, invigorating. I had a small group of friends, and by the first few months, we all knew what was going on. We could talk among ourselves, but we dare not talk where anybody could hear us. One of the guys developed an artificial language which we all learned and could talk about and it was code. It was distorting the English language is what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: But that was commonplace in Oak Ridge, even for the powers that be, wasn’t it? They came up with names of things and –
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Tuballoy [code name for refined natural uranium].
Mr. Lord: Yeah. Everything had a name or a number. All the things in a calutron had either strange names or numbers and they were nothing that resembled what was in the real world. 714 was dry ice. No, “liquid nitrogen.” 753 was dry ice.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? It had nothing to do with –
Mr. Lord: I don’t know where they got their numbers.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably from the catalog. That’s probably –
Mr. Lord: Well, it could have been.
Mr. McDaniel: It could have been the page in the catalog that they had to order it from.
Mr. Lord: I don’t think they would have dared to do that.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Somebody would have figured it out.
Mr. Lord: Somebody might have figured it out and then they’d be in trouble.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But as a single person, you said it was invigorating and challenging and exciting.
Mr. Lord: And we were learning more each time we went to work, and we knew we were doing something that was going to work out in the end to end the war, we believed. Mostly, I kept going to work. I didn’t have much time off. We worked six days a week in those days. And when I was drafted into the Army, I basically worked seven days a week just because that’s what I did on Sundays.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. I understand. But once Kay came and you had a family and you started having kids –
Mr. Lord: That was different. And we –
Mr. McDaniel: You kind of settled into life.
Mr. Lord: We settled into life. We had some – well we lived with a family who I had known the man before and he was the one that offered me a place when he found out that I was being drafted. And that was a great relief because rooms for GIs were scarce and high priced. And being a friend of mine, he was very kind to us on the rent. We paid ten dollars a month when he was paying thirty. He didn’t gouge us. A lot of GIs got gouged.
Mr. McDaniel: Did they? So how much were you making back then?
Mr. Lord: Forty dollars a month. Forty-two dollars a month as a Private First Class, and I got promotions rather rapidly. By the time we moved to the Victory Cottage and I had been in almost eighteen months, I had reached the grade of Technician Third Grade, which meant three stripes and a rocker. And it meant that I was qualified for separate housing for a family. I can’t tell you how much I was making then. A hundred and fifteen dollars a month, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: When you left the army and went back to work for Tennessee Eastman, did you have to take a pay cut or did you make more money then, or do you recall? Or was it about the same?
Mr. Lord: I probably went back at the same rate that I was when I left. That, I think, was what was required by the law, that it’d be at least that much and that’s probably what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: You talked a lot about your career. We talked to your wife a little bit about your life. But if there was one thing that really stood out in your memory as far as your experience in Oak Ridge, whether it was professional or personal, what would that one thing be?
Mr. Lord: I think it had to be the day the bomb was dropped.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Did you personally feel a sense of –
Mr. Lord: Elation.
Mr. McDaniel: Elation. Did you feel a sense of contribution, that you had done something?
Mr. Lord: Oh, absolutely. I think everybody in Oak Ridge felt that. They all contributed. From the bus driver on up to whatever, they all contributed. Even the people who stayed at home, they contributed by supporting their families.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess you all were the age, too, where you probably had friends that were lost in the war.
Mr. Lord: I did. I lost half a dozen from my high school class. I think it was a half a dozen. There’s two names I can remember, but I’m sure there were more that I’ve forgotten now.
Mr. McDaniel: One of my interviews with Bill Wilcox, he talked about his best childhood friend was shot down in World War II, and he kind of has that same sense of contribution, of accomplishment.
Mr. Lord: That didn’t happen to me. My best childhood friends survived the war. As much as I know about them. None of my classmates in college were lost in the war that I can remember.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably many of – you were probably in a field of study, I’d bet a lot of them were like you. They were kind of handpicked out for special things because they had education and experience and training, and those weren’t the guys they were going to send to the frontlines necessarily.
Mr. Lord: No, that’s true. And when I said ‘classmates,’ I was really thinking of the small class of electrical engineers. We were in a separate building and associated with each other more than we associated with the other engineers. Although I did know of some of the other engineers, and one of them was John Shacter, and I was surprised to find that he was an Oak Ridger, when it finally came out, when he finally moved in across the street from me.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Lord: That’s when I found out.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well is there anything else you want to touch on or talk about?
Mr. Lord: Well, I think living in Oak Ridge was a great opportunity. It was a great opportunity that benefited the people who lived in Oak Ridge. It was a great opportunity to contribute to the end of the war and what we contributed out beyond the war, I think, has been useful. I would not have changed it for anything else that I can think of. I tried to get in the Navy three times, and I’m glad I didn’t, and glad I ended up a Private in the army.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, if you have anything that you wanted – if you had a legacy from Oak Ridge, if you had something that you wanted people to remember about your life in Oak Ridge, what would that be?
Mr. Lord: Well, right now I’m a member of Mended Hearts, and up until very recently I was visiting heart patients as they came out of their surgery. I’ve been doing that since 1996, and I’d like to be remembered for my contribution to helping heart patients.
Mr. McDaniel: What made you do that? Did you have –
Mr. Lord: I had heart surgery. And the thing that made me do it was to see other people who were not doing as well as I was. They were discouraged. They thought they were never going to be able to do anything again. And one of my friends said, “I won’t even be able to work in the garden,” and I knew from my experience that that was just not true. So I decided to join the group and be the messenger that there is life after heart surgery. And my experience was that I got right back into hiking as quick as I could and I took my first hike in the mountains at four months and I climbed Mount LeConte at six. So I was determined to get well. And I continued hiking up until two or three years ago when my hiking buddies began to drop off. I don’t have any hiking buddies left that are able to hike.
Mr. McDaniel: But after you retired, you had a whole completely different life in Oak Ridge, and it was apparently as rewarding as before while you were working. I guess rewarding in a different way.
Mr. Lord: Well it was personally rewarding and we traveled a lot. On the day I retired, we left for a month’s vacation driving through to the west coast.
Mr. McDaniel: You were ready to get out of town, weren’t you?
Mr. Lord: I was ready to get out of town. Three o’clock, we left. I was glad to retire.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that was a good thing to do though.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you got away, you got your mind off of things. You just had an opportunity.
Mr. Lord: I retired in the perfect way. I cut my links with work except I went back and did some work, and other people, I’m sure, felt that they were no longer useful after they retired. I felt I was useful after I was retired, and for a number of years I actually had a Lab badge to be able to go back.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, did you?
Mr. Lord: I got it because they had some questions they wanted to ask about the cyclotron that I had worked on for so long.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were the go-to-guy for that.
Mr. Lord: I was the go-to-guy along with my partner Ed Hudson who died recently. We worked as a team and we both went back and answered questions at the Lab and gave them our help as good as we can, and I think contributed some. So we managed to stay useful. We also formed a little company for consulting and did a little bit of consulting but never made any money at it. There were three of us in the company, Ed Hudson, Dick Lord, and Ed Mann. He was a mechanical engineer and we were both electrical engineers. We had a few jobs and we acted like whoever did it was acting for the corporation and split the money. We never did really well with it; we let it die for lack of paying the state.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. Is there anything that I’ve not gone over or not asked that you’d like to talk about? I think we’re about to wrap things up.
Mr. Lord: Oh, we had a good social life, lots of friends, lots of people we could go to for help. We belong to a church that’s very outreaching to members and to other people. We feel that we could call on anybody in the church to help, and we’ve had some help because we’ve had some bad health. And we’ve had help from friends. We have a daughter that lives in Oak Ridge and we have grandchildren here. So we’ve had a family life that’s an extended family life and we’re on good terms with everybody in the family. And they come and visit us and they come and help us when we need them. My son and daughter-in-law came to help my wife take care of me when I was in the hospital last year. You just can’t beat it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
Mr. Lord: You’re very welcome. I’m glad I could remember what I did.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Very good.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF RICHARD S. LORD
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
March 17, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is March 17th, 2011 and I’m at the home of Dick and Kay Lord here in Oak Ridge and I’m talking with Dick Lord. Dick, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Mr. Lord: We’re glad to have this opportunity to talk to you.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Well, tell me a little bit – I just spoke to your wife and we found a little bit about her and her background. Why don’t you tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family?
Mr. Lord: Well, I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but as an infant I moved from there, so I have no recollections other than going back for visits, which I did because I had relatives there. I grew up in Pitman, New Jersey. It was a town of five thousand people with most people working somewhere else. The only industry in Pitman was the laundry and people worked at refineries over on the Delaware River where they worked in Philadelphia for various entities, a lot of them with the railroad. My father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia. He never was in the operating of trains. He was in the office business. We first met in Sunday school. We were both pretty young at that time. And I was playing the organ for Sunday school and I guess I moved on to playing the organ for church shortly after we met.
Mr. McDaniel: So what did your mom do when you were growing up?
Mr. Lord: My mom was a stay-at-home mom and she had a routine. She washed on Mondays. She’d iron on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I’ve forgotten what she did. But there was a task for every day and she kept busy at home.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you have brothers or sisters?
Mr. Lord: No, I’m an only child.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re an only child. But you kept her busy, though, didn’t you.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah. I can remember her chasing me with a switch. I don’t remember what it is I did, but it was something I wasn’t supposed to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, you said you played organ fairly early. So you must have gotten that love of music from somebody.
Mr. Lord: My mother loved music. She and her sister, my aunt, would go to the Metropolitan Opera when they were in Philadelphia. And once in a while, when I was high school age, she would give her ticket to me and my aunt would give her ticket to my cousin and we would go over and hear the opera if it were particularly useful, interesting. Or the other case would be when it was particularly uninteresting to my mother and my aunt. So we had several occasions when we went to the opera. I enjoyed listening to symphonic music. I enjoyed listening to the big band music. I still do. And I had to take piano lessons. I didn’t really like taking piano lessons, and I didn’t get to be very good at it, but it was enough to entertain me, so I have a piano.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to say. You’re sitting in front of a baby grand there, so you must play decently, then.
Mr. Lord: I played enough to amuse myself and I did play piano for one of the churches for a while. So I didn’t consider myself an accomplished piano player, but I was adequate.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you said you met your wife at Sunday school.
Mr. Lord: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – and I guess you were, what, a teenager by then?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I think so.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about that.
Mr. Lord: We didn’t date at first and only after I started going to college did we have a closer association. We’d ride the train together sometimes, you know, just happened to be on the same train. I don’t know which one of us arranged that happenstance.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand. So where did you go to college?
Mr. Lord: I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Mr. McDaniel: And what did you study there?
Mr. Lord: Fortunately I studied engineering. I’m an electrical engineer. And because of that, I was able to stay in college and finish my degree when everybody else was being drafted. The feeling was that I might be learning something useful for the army which turned out to be right.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me what happened. So you graduated. Did the army already have their eye on you?
Mr. Lord: Yeah, they did. The draft board did. They called me in while I was a sophomore, I think. And asked what I was doing and was it useful foreseeably for the military. And I described the courses I was taking and how they might be useful for the military and they deferred me. I think they called me in a second time, but I can’t remember for sure that they did, when I was almost finished. Because of the war, I finished my degree in three years. We went to classes in two summers; the summer after our sophomore year and the summer after our junior year. So we ended up getting our degree in just about three years from the time I started. I started in September and graduated in October of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: So in October, when you graduated, what happened?
Mr. Lord: Well, long before I graduated, I’d had an interview with various companies looking for employees. One of them was Eastman Kodak. And I had an interest in photography and I thought, “Well, maybe that’s an opportunity.” So I expressed interest to the interviewer that I was interested in his company at least and it wasn’t long after I talked to him before I got an offer of a job in the spring of 1945, before I’d even finished my senior year. There was no specifics about the job, and in the summer I got a letter from them offering a specific job in Tennessee. No word of what it might be about. Some of my classmates had knowledge of what it might be in Tennessee and one of them suggested that it might be the Holston Ordinance Works in Kingsport. And he was pretty sure that was what it was. But it turned out not to be that. They told me to report to the Empire Building in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’m sorry, they didn’t tell me that. They told me to report to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which didn’t appear on any map. When you asked the post office about it, they didn’t know about it. My father, who worked the railroad, used that kind of information to find out about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it just didn’t appear anywhere. So I had to write a letter back to the fellows that offered me the job and say, “We can’t find Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” And I got a telegram back and it said, “Report to the Empire Building in Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Mr. McDaniel: The Empire Building? I’ve not heard of that one before.
Mr. Lord: Well, it was an office building on one of the side streets.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I can’t remember what street it was. That’s where the Tennessee Eastman had their employment office in Knoxville. That’s what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, when was this? This was ’45?
Mr. Lord: This was ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: And you hadn’t graduated college yet, had you?
Mr. Lord: Not when I got the offer and the instruction where to report.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, right.
Mr. Lord: I graduated October 30th and –
Mrs. Lord: It was ’42.
Mr. Lord: I’m sorry. I graduated in 1943. ’43.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. ’43. That’s fine.
Mr. Lord: My memory is not what it should be. I graduated in ’43 and that’s when I got the offer to come to Oak Ridge and that’s when I came was in October.
Mr. McDaniel: You came in ’43.
Mr. Lord: I came in October – no, I came in November ’43. November the 10th.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. 1943. So you graduated in October of ’43 and then came to Oak Ridge in November of ’43.
Mr. Lord: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. That’s fine.
Mr. Lord: Finally, we got it right.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s quite all right. So you came here and you were still single at the time.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about your first impressions. When you came to Knoxville, you went to the Empire Building. How did you get to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lord: Well the first thing they did when I got to the Empire Building was try to find me a place to live, because there were no places in Oak Ridge. So they sent me out to a place on 5th Avenue in Knoxville to the home of a person who had offered to rent rooms to people that Tennessee Eastman might hire. And the name of the family escapes me right now. It might come back to me. But the room was very pleasant. The family was very pleasant. They even had a piano in their living room. And so I took them up on it at $6 per week. As soon as I’d seen the room, the person who took me out there took me back to the employment office and they sent me out to Oak Ridge on the same day I arrived in Knoxville. And you asked my impression of Oak Ridge. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. They had machines moving earth in great quantities. Machines I had never seen before. I’d seen bulldozers. I’d seen steam shovels, but this one I’m talking about just scooped up the earth and moved it from here to there. And they were all over and there were construction machines running up and down the Turnpike constantly. It was mud or dust everywhere. When I arrived, the mud hadn’t arrived yet, but it wasn’t long before it was mud. And my first trip to Knoxville was to find some galoshes. They didn’t exist in Oak Ridge. They were sold out. But I did find a pair in Knoxville. Almost the last pair in the store, I think. And so I was more prepared than a lot of people for the mud when it came. But I remember that it could suck the shoes right off your feet.
Mr. McDaniel: Now what did they tell you? What were you supposed to do? What was your job?
Mr. Lord: What did they tell me? Well, what they told me was they’d lost my clearance. And I wouldn’t be going to the real work going on. I would be in the Training Division in the center of Oak Ridge, actually behind what was the Administration Building for the Army. There were some buildings back there where the Training Division existed and my job consisted of teaching people they’d hired, that is mostly women. I didn’t teach anybody but women. They hired them to be what were going to be called Cubicle Operators. Of course, I knew nothing about cubicles. They hadn’t even told me about that yet. That was restricted.
Mr. McDaniel: Was this out at Y-12? The Cubicle Operators? Where were they?
Mr. Lord: They were to be at Y-12. But they were not needed in Y-12 then, because the place wasn’t in operation.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess these were what they referred to today as calutron girls.
Mr. Lord: Yes. And they had two classifications. They were hiring people to do the calutron directly operating and then they were planning to hire people they called heater operators, which would be in the level below the calutrons and where they had to make adjustments on the heaters that heated the source in the calutron. That was something else I didn’t know about, of course, at that time. So all I could do was teach them a little bit of elementary physics and we did that the best we could. I worked in partnership with Leon Love. He would take the class for a while and then I’d take the class for a while. And that went on for a number of weeks. I think they finally reactivated my clearance – or sent out new papers for a clearance, for an investigation. And the people I had on the reference list had to fill out another recommendation, that sort of thing. Aggravating. It was aggravating to me because I wasn’t really thrilled with what I was doing.
Mr. McDaniel: And at this point you didn’t know and you had no idea what was going on.
Mr. Lord: I had no idea what was going on. I finally got a clearance, and at the same time, the Training Division moved to Y-12. And they wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay in the Training Division. But I got to see what was at Y-12. I got a tour of the different buildings with somebody as my guide and when I got to 9731, I saw my first Calutron. At that point, I knew they were separating something. Because of my background in physics, I recognized it as a very large Dempster mass spectrograph, which would have been – in the physics lab, it would have been this big, and in Y-12 it was, well, this big.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. It was huge.
Mr. Lord: And of course, nobody would tell me they were separating something.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But you knew.
Mr. Lord: That was my first inclination, first suspicion of what was going on. And then I began to realize it was on a very large scale. Because each one of the calutrons was part of what was called a track which had ninety-six calutrons in it and then there were multiple tracks at that time and they were still building them. So I had to continue teaching operators, but now I could teach them about cubicles and how to operate them even though I knew nothing about it.
Mr. McDaniel: But at least they gave you a point of reference to kind of know what you were doing, know why you were teaching.
Mr. Lord: I got some information about what to do with cubicles and then I could pass this on to the students. And they began to graduate out into the real world and become operators.
Mr. McDaniel: So how long did they keep you in the Training Division?
Mr. Lord: Until early 1945, when I was inducted into the Army. When I got my draft notice – incidentally my draft notice came while I was visiting in Pitman, New Jersey, over Christmastime, in ’44, ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: ’44.
Mr. Lord: ’44. I had been living in the “D” house with a number of other fellows, five others, and I got a telegraph from them saying that my induction notice had come and my induction notice came from my draft board in Glassboro, New Jersey. And I was supposed to be inducted from there. Well, everything I owned, which wasn’t much, was in Oak Ridge. And also, first thing I did was tell my building superintendent that I got my draft notice. And he says, “Well, don’t worry. You’ll be coming back.” And of course that worked out.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So tell me, how did that happen? So you got drafted.
Mr. Lord: I got drafted. I was drafted from Clinton, took the bus to Chattanooga, stopped in Kingston for breakfast at Peggy Ann’s Restaurant, which you may know.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Lord: And we went to – what the heck was the name of the Fort in Chattanooga? It escapes me. We were inducted officially at the army installation in Chattanooga. That is, we raised our hands and swore to defend the Constitution. And that was just basically an overnight stop. Then they sent us on to Atlanta to Fort McPherson, and we spent a couple of weeks in Fort McPherson. We were issued uniforms and given tests, told how to behave and taught how to make a bed, all those things that the first GI’s learned right away. And it was a classification center. So they decided on the basis of what they learned about you in Fort McPherson what you were going to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Where you were going to go. Sure.
Mr. Lord: What you were suited for. But two fellows who went with me from Oak Ridge to Fort McPherson and I had special orders. So before the full period at Fort McPherson was up, they issued us Pullman tickets to Shreveport, Louisiana. And they gave us a double bed with an upper bunk, so two of us bunked together on the lower berth and one of us on the upper. We had a stopover in New Orleans to change trains and then we arrived in Shreveport somewhere around midnight the next day.
Mr. McDaniel: So what were you going to Shreveport for?
Mr. Lord: Basic training.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, basic training, okay.
Mr. Lord: That was –
Mr. McDaniel: You didn’t get out of basic training, you –
Mr. Lord: We had our taste of basic training. We arrived when the program had already started for the group that we were in. So we got in at least three weeks after the start. But we did go through things like gas mask use and firing range. We got to do that. We got a lot of KP. We were inducted into that. And we just went along with the flow of that particular bunch of guys who were going through basic training. And then after a few weeks, our orders arrived and they sent us back to Oak Ridge. Mr. McDaniel: So you were gone from Oak Ridge, what, six, seven weeks?
Mr. Lord: Three weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Three weeks? Right.
Mr. Lord: Well, three weeks of basic training. There were a few weeks in Atlanta. So I don’t remember the total. You’re right, six or seven weeks altogether.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you ended up back in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lord: We ended up back in Oak Ridge after our trip back from Louisiana. We had tickets for Pullman space, but there was no space available and we sat on our luggage from Shreveport to Birmingham.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh my goodness.
Mr. Lord: In Birmingham, we got a seat. An hour before we got to Knoxville, the Pullman conductor came back and said, “I got seats for you up in the parlor car.” So we were upgraded from coach to parlor car for about an hour. And we were met by somebody from the detachment, the SED [Special Engineering Detachment] detachment in Oak Ridge at the train and went out by car. Got a lecture from the sergeant in the detachment telling us about the security that the place had and the project had. Of course, we knew all about that. And we were forbidden to leave the SED fenced area until we had gone through the security indoctrination. And after he finished, why, we went out the front gate and went to visit our friends. Fortunately, nobody caught us at it. I don’t know what they would have done.
Mr. McDaniel: So you ended up – now did you end up back on the same job or was it something completely different?
Mr. Lord: No, it was the same. Well, it was different. It was different. They had arranged for me to be on the division staff to help bring the helium leak detectors into use throughout the project. Finding vacuum leaks was a big job and the helium leak detector was supposed to make it a lot easier. And I was supposed to help integrate it into the system and train people in the use of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was that at Y-12?
Mr. Lord: Y-12, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was in the whole calutron system.
Mr. Lord: Yep. I went to every building that was operational and made sure that everybody knew what they were doing. It was a lot more pleasant than what I was doing before. At least I got to do something technical, something that an engineer might do.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess at this point, this was what, the winter of ’45, right in there?
Mr. Lord: Well, the spring of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: Spring of ’45. So I guess things were rolling –
Mr. Lord: ’44. ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it ’44?
Mr. Lord: Yeah, spring of ’44. I was inducted in –
Mr. McDaniel: How long were you in Oak Ridge before you went into the service? Were you here a year or just a few months?
Mr. Lord: You got me. I got to think about that.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, because a while ago, you said you got your draft notice over Christmas of ’44.
Mr. Lord: That had to be right.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came back in the spring of ’45. And –
Mr. Lord: Spring of ’45.
Mr. McDaniel: And you got married that summer.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, I don’t know how we did that, because I was in the Army when we decided to get married and that was while I was visiting in New Jersey. Oh. We decided to get married when I first went – before I first went into the Army. When I got my draft notice is when we decided to get married. But I worked a whole year.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You were in Oak Ridge a whole year before you got your draft notice.
Mr. Lord: And six months after I was in the Army, basically six months after, we decided to get married. We got the timeline down.
Mr. McDaniel: So I guess my point was back when you – by the time you got back, things were really rolling in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Lord: Pretty much.
Mr. McDaniel: It was going strong.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, it was going strong, at least in a few buildings. And it kept expanding as time went on.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, exactly. I guess all the Alpha buildings were operational.
Mr. Lord: Yeah. In the job I had I also was in the Beta buildings doing the same kind of work. So I expanded my territory.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you say you came back and you worked there. Tell me what happened I guess after the – you got married that summer. You brought Kay down and she came down.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, and we rented our one room in a house, and I went out and bought a bed at Millers Department Store in Oak Ridge, and they delivered it. We didn’t even have a chest of drawers in the room. Shortly after we moved in, we made a trip to Knoxville and bought a chest of drawers. I had to pay cash. We couldn’t charge it, because we didn’t have any credit. But we could put our clothes in something that had drawers.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. And then the bombs were dropped and the war was over that year. You were still in the service though. So how long were you in the army and what did you do?
Mr. Lord: I was in eighteen months.
Mr. McDaniel: And were you in Oak Ridge the whole time?
Mr. Lord: I was in Oak Ridge the whole time. Well, except for the time getting in and out of the army.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But when you left the army, what happened to your job?
Mr. Lord: When I left the army, I was reemployed by Tennessee Eastman. There was a rule passed by Congress that when the war was over, workers were entitled to come back to jobs that they’d had before the war if it still existed. And I’d met that qualification, as did several other people. But the employment at Tennessee Eastman took a serious drop in, I guess, 1946 when K-25 came online and proved to be much more efficient than the calutron process. But I was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay employed, and we were put in a division that was to try to improve the operation of the calutrons to where it can compete. We didn’t make it. We tried mightily, but we didn’t make it.
Mr. McDaniel: And they shut the calutrons down, basically, when K-25 took over.
Mr. Lord: Except for a few that were kept operating on special separations.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Was that part of the nuclear medicine work?
Mr. Lord: Well, somewhat. I mean there were several programs going on. The program that really kept them open was the one that was promoted by Chris Keim to separate all the stable isotopes that might be possibly useful for anything. And so Beta 3 stayed open and was largely employed in that process for a long time.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you – was that what you were involved in?
Mr. Lord: I was – no. I was in this division that was supposed to improve operation. But our division director came from the lab at Berkeley and he saw these magnets not being used as possible cyclotrons. And the Cold War was coming into prominence at that time, and the need for polonium 202 was coming up. And he figured that if we built the right kind of cyclotron, we could separate polonium 202 in massive quantities. It turned out to be a good idea. And our division with the help of the Engineering Division cobbled up a cyclotron out of magnet parts from the calutrons and then other things that were needed to make a cyclotron. And I became very involved in the operation, and making the cyclotron operate was the first job, and that was not trivial. There were a number of weeks where we sweated twenty-four hours a day trying to make that cyclotron go. But every time we’d turn on the high voltage for the radio frequency system, it would just not work. We had various theories about it, and one day, I think it was me that was looking through the glass window when they turned on the high voltage and I observed the glow inside. And we talked about it for a few minutes and decided that was detuning the oscillator. And we had to – it was electrons oscillating back and forth that loaded the oscillator down to where it wouldn’t work. The fixes that were talked about were the one that was used in Berkeley, which was use a low power oscillator to get it started, but bring it up slowly, and the other one was to insulate the radio frequency structure that was inside the cyclotron from ground and put a DC voltage on it to sweep electrons out. And that’s the one we elected to do. And we fixed it up and put some rubber hoses in to carry the water to cool the D. We told our division director what we were doing, and he says, “You’re not putting rubber hoses in my cyclotron.” And we went off dragging our tails behind us. He went on vacation that coming week, and we took out the rubber hoses and we put plastic hoses in, and we turned on the switch and it worked like magic. We had an operating cyclotron when he got back from vacation, and there was nothing wrong with plastic hoses, which we eventually changed for rubber hoses.
Mr. McDaniel: So he was pleased.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, he was pleased with that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Tell me a little bit about the evolution of your work and your job there. After that project, what did you –
Mr. Lord: Well, after the eighty-six inch cyclotron in Y-12, the thing that was coming into the cyclotron world at that time was a new design that was going to allow single frequency cyclotrons to accelerate particles to a much higher energy than was possible with the current designs. And it was called a Thomas cyclotron or an alternating variable field cyclotron. And we managed to get approval for it from both our current local people and money from Washington. And we went on to build the Oak Ridge – the ORIC [Oak Ridge Isochronous Cyclotron] cyclotron, O-R-I-C. And that was built in X-10, so my office moved to X-10. We started in Y-12 on that project but moved to X-10 in the middle of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now at this point, who was running things? Union Carbide?
Mr. Lord: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And they were running all the locations, weren’t they? Managing all the locations?
Mr. Lord: That’s true. Tennessee Eastman had gone out of the business shortly after – well, almost immediately after shutdown of production phase of Y-12. So we were employed by Union Carbide.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, about what year was it that you moved your office from Y-12 to the Lab.
Mr. Lord: 1960. We started the design in Y-12 and we finished over in X-10 about in 1960. And I think we had the first beam in ’63, but I can’t swear by that. Anyhow, that came on line in the early ’60s. The other cyclotron I was talking about came on line in 1953. And as of today, I think the ORIC cyclotron is still running. But they just got the death notice when they said they’re going to shut down the Holifield Lab. So it has run since early ’60s until 2011.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Almost 50 years.
Mr. Lord: And I think that’s amazing for some of the components to last that long. I was very much involved with the design of the magnet and the magnet coils, which nobody expected to last this long. Surely the insulation would fail by this time. It was made of paper and Mylar. We put in strips of paper with Mylar between them. And somehow or other it survived. Mylar must be pretty good for radiation resistance and so is paper. That’s what we were worried about was something failing because of radiation damage.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’63, they went on line and so what did you do after that?
Mr. Lord: Well, I had other projects related to the cyclotron. I was in charge of building a polarized ion source for the cyclotron, getting the beam from the polarized ion source into the cyclotron. Then I was involved in injecting the beam from the tandem into the cyclotron so that we could accelerate it further with the cyclotron. The big tandem came along and was a standalone accelerator and then the idea of putting it into the cyclotron and increasing the energy came along. That was my project. And I have to say they worked successfully in both cases.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you do that kind of work until you retired, that type of work?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. Magnet design was my specialty. And when I retired, I was busy designing a bending magnet to replace something that was in there, and I came back as a consultant. I worked three days a week until the money ran out.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you retire?
Mr. Lord: I retired in 1984, the day that Union Carbide left.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Lord: Yeah. I didn’t want to work for [laughter].
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I understand. I guess that was a good opportunity though, wasn’t it? It was a good time.
Mr. Lord: It was a good time to go. I was sixty-one years old and things were changing. You couldn’t install a light fixture without having three people, and it was just getting to be paperwork running out your ears, and it got worse when Carbide left. Carbide was great. We thought badly of Carbide when we first had to leave Kodak, Tennessee Eastman. But Carbide turned out to be a very good company to work for.
Mr. McDaniel: They just kind of left you alone and let you do your thing, didn’t they?
Mr. Lord: Exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. So you retired in ’84 when Carbide left. Then you went back as a consultant for three days a week for how many years?
Mr. Lord: Not very long. I’m not sure that it went as long as a year.
Mr. McDaniel: Now that you look back on your career here in Oak Ridge – basically you worked here your whole career.
Mr. Lord: Absolutely. I worked in Oak Ridge. I lived in Oak Ridge. I was proud of what we did.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Tell me about that. Tell me about your satisfaction factor in all of it, personally.
Mr. Lord: I had a lot of personal satisfaction. I didn’t have any beefs that were significant with anything in the organization that I worked for. They were good to me. I got to travel to foreign countries and discuss our work at technical meetings. We were doing something that was cutting edge, nobody had done before. It was very satisfactory to be on that kind of project.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were successful and you were able to have a sense of accomplishment because you were successful.
Mr. Lord: Sense of accomplishment.
Mr. McDaniel: And it changed things. I mean the work that you did really changed things.
Mr. Lord: Yeah, it did. Not like the Manhattan Project changed things. And I was proud of the Manhattan Project, very much so.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Tell me about the day that you learned that the war was over and that Oak Ridge had been doing what it was doing and its role in the Manhattan Project.
Mr. Lord: I knew what Oak Ridge was doing long before that. And I knew that the end of the war was coming. Because I had, not definite statements that the bomb was coming, but all kinds of indications that –
[telephone rings]
Mr. McDaniel: It’s okay. Go Ahead.
Mr. Lord: All kinds of indications that the bomb was coming. And when we were on our honeymoon, Truman issued his ultimatum: “Surrender or else.” And I knew that when that came, it was coming, and it came just a couple of weeks after we came back from our honeymoon.
Mr. McDaniel: And I’ll ask this a lot. Today, I’m sure, as your wife mentioned, there are folks who don’t understand. They don’t understand what it was like during World War II.
Mr. Lord: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: They just see that the bomb was dropped and the people were killed and that’s all they see.
Mr. Lord: “That’s terrible. Why would you ever do that?” I had a big argument with some Englishmen in England about that. They were on the side that it should never have been dropped, and I was on the side that had seen – not literally seen but been aware of all the terrible things that were involved in the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely. Invariably, when I’ve interviewed folks here in the early days of Oak Ridge, and I’ve asked them their thoughts now, invariably, they say, “You know, it was a terrible, terrible, horrible war and something had to be done to stop it. And it was a horrible thing, the bomb being dropped, but something big had to happen. Something like that had to happen to make it stop.”
Mr. Lord: I think you’re right.
Mr. McDaniel: Fifty-four million people died worldwide during World War II. And people who didn’t live it, they don’t understand that, do they?
Mr. Lord: They do not. When I was in basic training, we had to see training films of actual battles going on, people dying, naval battles where ships were sinking full of people, people being blown apart. And unless you understand, it’s hard to know what happened in the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So I talked a little bit to your wife about this. What was life like for you in Oak Ridge? I’m sure you worked a lot. But you had your social life as well, too.
Mr. Lord: Well, as a single person in Oak Ridge, it was challenging, invigorating. I had a small group of friends, and by the first few months, we all knew what was going on. We could talk among ourselves, but we dare not talk where anybody could hear us. One of the guys developed an artificial language which we all learned and could talk about and it was code. It was distorting the English language is what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: But that was commonplace in Oak Ridge, even for the powers that be, wasn’t it? They came up with names of things and –
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Tuballoy [code name for refined natural uranium].
Mr. Lord: Yeah. Everything had a name or a number. All the things in a calutron had either strange names or numbers and they were nothing that resembled what was in the real world. 714 was dry ice. No, “liquid nitrogen.” 753 was dry ice.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? It had nothing to do with –
Mr. Lord: I don’t know where they got their numbers.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably from the catalog. That’s probably –
Mr. Lord: Well, it could have been.
Mr. McDaniel: It could have been the page in the catalog that they had to order it from.
Mr. Lord: I don’t think they would have dared to do that.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Somebody would have figured it out.
Mr. Lord: Somebody might have figured it out and then they’d be in trouble.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But as a single person, you said it was invigorating and challenging and exciting.
Mr. Lord: And we were learning more each time we went to work, and we knew we were doing something that was going to work out in the end to end the war, we believed. Mostly, I kept going to work. I didn’t have much time off. We worked six days a week in those days. And when I was drafted into the Army, I basically worked seven days a week just because that’s what I did on Sundays.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. I understand. But once Kay came and you had a family and you started having kids –
Mr. Lord: That was different. And we –
Mr. McDaniel: You kind of settled into life.
Mr. Lord: We settled into life. We had some – well we lived with a family who I had known the man before and he was the one that offered me a place when he found out that I was being drafted. And that was a great relief because rooms for GIs were scarce and high priced. And being a friend of mine, he was very kind to us on the rent. We paid ten dollars a month when he was paying thirty. He didn’t gouge us. A lot of GIs got gouged.
Mr. McDaniel: Did they? So how much were you making back then?
Mr. Lord: Forty dollars a month. Forty-two dollars a month as a Private First Class, and I got promotions rather rapidly. By the time we moved to the Victory Cottage and I had been in almost eighteen months, I had reached the grade of Technician Third Grade, which meant three stripes and a rocker. And it meant that I was qualified for separate housing for a family. I can’t tell you how much I was making then. A hundred and fifteen dollars a month, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: When you left the army and went back to work for Tennessee Eastman, did you have to take a pay cut or did you make more money then, or do you recall? Or was it about the same?
Mr. Lord: I probably went back at the same rate that I was when I left. That, I think, was what was required by the law, that it’d be at least that much and that’s probably what it was.
Mr. McDaniel: You talked a lot about your career. We talked to your wife a little bit about your life. But if there was one thing that really stood out in your memory as far as your experience in Oak Ridge, whether it was professional or personal, what would that one thing be?
Mr. Lord: I think it had to be the day the bomb was dropped.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Did you personally feel a sense of –
Mr. Lord: Elation.
Mr. McDaniel: Elation. Did you feel a sense of contribution, that you had done something?
Mr. Lord: Oh, absolutely. I think everybody in Oak Ridge felt that. They all contributed. From the bus driver on up to whatever, they all contributed. Even the people who stayed at home, they contributed by supporting their families.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess you all were the age, too, where you probably had friends that were lost in the war.
Mr. Lord: I did. I lost half a dozen from my high school class. I think it was a half a dozen. There’s two names I can remember, but I’m sure there were more that I’ve forgotten now.
Mr. McDaniel: One of my interviews with Bill Wilcox, he talked about his best childhood friend was shot down in World War II, and he kind of has that same sense of contribution, of accomplishment.
Mr. Lord: That didn’t happen to me. My best childhood friends survived the war. As much as I know about them. None of my classmates in college were lost in the war that I can remember.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably many of – you were probably in a field of study, I’d bet a lot of them were like you. They were kind of handpicked out for special things because they had education and experience and training, and those weren’t the guys they were going to send to the frontlines necessarily.
Mr. Lord: No, that’s true. And when I said ‘classmates,’ I was really thinking of the small class of electrical engineers. We were in a separate building and associated with each other more than we associated with the other engineers. Although I did know of some of the other engineers, and one of them was John Shacter, and I was surprised to find that he was an Oak Ridger, when it finally came out, when he finally moved in across the street from me.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Lord: That’s when I found out.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well is there anything else you want to touch on or talk about?
Mr. Lord: Well, I think living in Oak Ridge was a great opportunity. It was a great opportunity that benefited the people who lived in Oak Ridge. It was a great opportunity to contribute to the end of the war and what we contributed out beyond the war, I think, has been useful. I would not have changed it for anything else that I can think of. I tried to get in the Navy three times, and I’m glad I didn’t, and glad I ended up a Private in the army.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, if you have anything that you wanted – if you had a legacy from Oak Ridge, if you had something that you wanted people to remember about your life in Oak Ridge, what would that be?
Mr. Lord: Well, right now I’m a member of Mended Hearts, and up until very recently I was visiting heart patients as they came out of their surgery. I’ve been doing that since 1996, and I’d like to be remembered for my contribution to helping heart patients.
Mr. McDaniel: What made you do that? Did you have –
Mr. Lord: I had heart surgery. And the thing that made me do it was to see other people who were not doing as well as I was. They were discouraged. They thought they were never going to be able to do anything again. And one of my friends said, “I won’t even be able to work in the garden,” and I knew from my experience that that was just not true. So I decided to join the group and be the messenger that there is life after heart surgery. And my experience was that I got right back into hiking as quick as I could and I took my first hike in the mountains at four months and I climbed Mount LeConte at six. So I was determined to get well. And I continued hiking up until two or three years ago when my hiking buddies began to drop off. I don’t have any hiking buddies left that are able to hike.
Mr. McDaniel: But after you retired, you had a whole completely different life in Oak Ridge, and it was apparently as rewarding as before while you were working. I guess rewarding in a different way.
Mr. Lord: Well it was personally rewarding and we traveled a lot. On the day I retired, we left for a month’s vacation driving through to the west coast.
Mr. McDaniel: You were ready to get out of town, weren’t you?
Mr. Lord: I was ready to get out of town. Three o’clock, we left. I was glad to retire.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that was a good thing to do though.
Mr. Lord: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you got away, you got your mind off of things. You just had an opportunity.
Mr. Lord: I retired in the perfect way. I cut my links with work except I went back and did some work, and other people, I’m sure, felt that they were no longer useful after they retired. I felt I was useful after I was retired, and for a number of years I actually had a Lab badge to be able to go back.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, did you?
Mr. Lord: I got it because they had some questions they wanted to ask about the cyclotron that I had worked on for so long.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were the go-to-guy for that.
Mr. Lord: I was the go-to-guy along with my partner Ed Hudson who died recently. We worked as a team and we both went back and answered questions at the Lab and gave them our help as good as we can, and I think contributed some. So we managed to stay useful. We also formed a little company for consulting and did a little bit of consulting but never made any money at it. There were three of us in the company, Ed Hudson, Dick Lord, and Ed Mann. He was a mechanical engineer and we were both electrical engineers. We had a few jobs and we acted like whoever did it was acting for the corporation and split the money. We never did really well with it; we let it die for lack of paying the state.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. Is there anything that I’ve not gone over or not asked that you’d like to talk about? I think we’re about to wrap things up.
Mr. Lord: Oh, we had a good social life, lots of friends, lots of people we could go to for help. We belong to a church that’s very outreaching to members and to other people. We feel that we could call on anybody in the church to help, and we’ve had some help because we’ve had some bad health. And we’ve had help from friends. We have a daughter that lives in Oak Ridge and we have grandchildren here. So we’ve had a family life that’s an extended family life and we’re on good terms with everybody in the family. And they come and visit us and they come and help us when we need them. My son and daughter-in-law came to help my wife take care of me when I was in the hospital last year. You just can’t beat it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
Mr. Lord: You’re very welcome. I’m glad I could remember what I did.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Very good.
[end of recording]